Portraiture, Celebrity, Interiority

Public talk by Dr. Andy McInnes at 1pm on 19th November 2014 at the Royal Cornwall Museum

This talk explores three moments captured in portrait painting, and their after-images, in visual and literary culture from the end of the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century: the ‘Cornish Wonder’ John Opie’s portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, which haunted the childhood of Mary Shelley; Pre-Raphaelite interest in Cornish myth and legend, particularly Tristan and Isolde; and the portrait of Caroline de Winter in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, used by Mrs Danvers to torment the novel’s unnamed narrator. Each of these moments witnesses the portrait becoming a portal through which the past haunts the present.

Book now by following this link: http://beinghumanfestival.org/event/cornish-window-individual-landscape-community-2/